THE END OF DOGMATIC METAPHYSICS

Don CUPPIT

By the later fourth century the Western tradition had become committed to realistic philosophical theism. It needs to be said at once that the marriage of faith with philosophy was never entirely problem-free and happy. On the contrary, the difficulties that were eventually to bring down philosophical monotheism were recognized by some from the outset. If God is a simple, infinite, necessary Being, he must fill everything. Where is there room for anything else to e!ist that is distinct from or independent of God" #ow can God so defined be related to the manifold contingencies of a changing, temporal, created world" #ow can God be thought of as personal, or be described in our language" $nd if God is so infinitely and overwhelmingly our one great end in life, our be all and end all, must he not annihilate all other cultural concerns" %onsidering these and similar &uestions, and considering also how completely we have become committed to a thoroughly postmetaphysical view of life, we may well wonder how the old metaphysical sort of belief in God ever got to seem as compelling and as clear as it did. 'he answer is that philosophical belief in God did not stand alone. It was surrounded by, embedded in, and sustained and given intelligibility by a whole raft of deep assumptions, most of which came ultimately from (lato. 'hese assumptions were the so-called absolute presuppositions )*. G. %ollingwood+s phrase, of the old Western culture. We -ust didn+t .now how many and deep they were/ but gradually, between 0escartes and 0errida, they were brought to light by the new critical .ind of philosophy. Once they were e!posed, the &uestion arose of whether they could be proved. 1ant tried to show that they could be proved, some of them at least, but only in a way that involved giving up the old metaphysics of God. Instead of being ob-ective truths propping up an ob-ective God, 1ant made them into -ust structural presuppositions and postulates of our .nowledge and our moral action. Others, however, though they admire 1ant+s great attempt to find a compromise, -udge rather that the old platonic assumptions collapsed and crumbled to dust as soon as they were e!posed to the light. $s soon as we could see them, we could see that they are groundless. But what were the assumptions" Occasionally we hear something said that gives us a glimpse of their continuing influence. We should seize such a moment and analyze what we hear. 2or e!ample, when some years ago the senior 2ellow in my college died, his successor as senior leaned toward me across the table and said in a strange harsh voice, a little grim, sardonic, triumphant, emphatic, fearful, and even envious3 Well, he knows now, doesn+t he"

*elat 456e3 'he end of dogmatic metaphysics

'hose words are a window. I thought about them for a few days, analyzing them bac.ward, and came up with this3 7ife

1. 'ruth is not manufactured by us/ it is discovered by us, or discovers )the

7atin vela, veil, gives us the word re-veals or un-veils) itself to us. &uestions of value, pree!ist out there, ob-ectively. there, awaiting us.

2. 'he answers to all properly framed &uestions, both &uestions of fact and 3. 'here is a great and final $nswer to the mystery of our e!istence, out 4. $ll these truths and answers )8, 4, are, so to say, tailored to our faculties
and our re&uirements. 'hey are in principle accessible and intelligible to us, so that we may reasonably hope and e!pect to discover them, or have them reveal themselves to us.

5. 'here is then something &uite dazzling, namely, a preestablished harmony

between thought and being, language and reality/ between the &uestions we want to as. and the $nswer that the nature of things is waiting to give us. )9otice that this most astonishing doctrine is also the one most profoundly ta.en for granted.,

6. 'he final $nswer will be revealed to us in or through death. 7. Our life is a pilgrimage toward death, the moment of truth, the moment of
absolute .nowledge.

8. Our life is a -ourney, then, from a) the relative to the absolute/ from b) time to eternity/ from c) the changing, sensuous world of becoming to the realm of pure
timeless intelligible Being/ from

d) the particular to the universal/ and from e) the mediated, discursive, through-a-glass-dar.ly sort of .nowledge,
to pure face-to-face unmista.able vision.

9. :ach person+s life is a story scripted beforehand, and there is a great ;tory
of :verything whose plot has been revealed to us in a Boo.. 'hat is in outline the world view, the story about the meaning of life, that my old friend was invo.ing at the lunch table. But this was the early 65<=s, and he .new as well as anyone that every bit of it is &uestionable. #e drew the grim, sardonic tone of his voice from the thought that death can still be relied upon anyway to settle the matter for each one of us in our turn. )#e is now dead himself, so the matter is settled for him., 'hat is by the way, for the moment. In >< I introduced a number of binary contrasts. 'hey came up while we were thin.ing about the difference between the way things are on life+s -ourney and the way we hope they+ll be when we get to life+s destination. 'hey are contrasts between two worlds, the earthly and the heavenly3

0on %?((I'

The Binary Contrasts 10. 'he binary contrasts )in ><, a-e,, and a number of other related contrasts,
are all analogously asymmetrical.

11. In each of the cases cited, the second of the pair3 a) is prior/ b) is superior )that is, greater in both value and reality, and therefore
standard-setting,/ and

c) in some way governs or produces or brings about the first. 12. 'hus the spiritual world above is in every way better and greater than this
material world below.

Being and Val e 13. 'here are degrees of reality, and of value. 14. 'he scale of degrees of being is also a scale of degrees of value, or
goodness, or perfection.

15. 'he @ost *eal is therefore the @ost Good, and vice versa3 for the #ighest
Good isAhas to beAthe ;upreme *eality.

16. 'o gain the highest .nowledge, we must purify our souls and perfect
ourselves/ and one should, in particular, prepare for death. We should add here a few of the principal causal ma!ims3

Ca sality 17. Ex nihilo nihil fit ) Out of nothing, nothing comes to be ,. 18. :very change has a cause/ or, every thing that is has a cause of its being. 19. 'he cause is prior to the effect/ the cause is responsible for, or accounts
for, the effect.

20. 'he cause is superior in reality to the effect. 21. 'he &ualities that are found in the effect pree!ist in a higher degree in the
cause. ;o the cause-effect relationship is modeled on the father-son relationship, as that was perceived in a traditional agri-cultural and patriarchal society. :very effect is a chip off the old bloc., and every created thing is a finite refracted image of its cosmic creator-2ather. 2or our present purposes we don+t need to go into more detail here, but one final proposition is worth adding. :astern thought is often therapeutic. It says that we are made unhappy by the violence of our own disorderly passions. When we have slowed down and our passions have become still, we may find complete happiness in a state of cool emptiness3 sunyata sunyata. By contrast, in Western thought the supreme good is a cognitive state, and a state of fullness rather than emptiness. We are absorbed in contemplation of, or are swallowed up into, an infinite and eternal perfection and fullness of Being.

*elat 456e3 'he end of dogmatic metaphysics

22. Our last end is the absolute .nowledge of what is greatest, most real, and
most perfect/ a .nowledge in which we shall en-oy eternal happiness. 9ow we see why 9ietzsche describes %atholicism as platonism for the masses and why, at an even later date, $. 9. Whitehead could describe the whole history of Western thought as footnotes to (lato 3 because so long as the deep assumptions )or most of them, remained in place, philosophical belief in God seemed perfectly natural and intelligible.. $nd conversely, as in the wor. of the ma-or critical philosophers )0escartes, #ume, 1ant, 9ietzsche, #eidegger, and 0errida,, the old assumptions of Western, or platonic, metaphysics have been brought to light and have crumbled away, so the credibility and even the very intelligibility of God have steadily faded away. $s we leave (lato behind and the culture becomes post-(hilosophical )*orty 65<8, pp. !!!vii ff.,, God evaporates. 'he God of realistic philosophical theism, the metaphysical God, the super-Being out there, was made possible by (lato, and dies with him. But the process is not &uite complete. 'here are still a few philosophical platonists, and in everyday conversation we may still hear people ma.ing the contrast between the material world and a distinct spiritual dimension. It remains possible )as 1ant, Wittgenstein, and 0errida all suspect, that (lato+s ghost will never be finally e!orcised, and people will always be tempted by the illusions of metaphysics. In which case the battle between nonrealists and realists over God will never end. :!cerpt from After God. Bor. 655C, p. DC-E8. he !uture of "eligion, #arper%ollins (ublishers, 9ew